[Clubber]

Ladies, please, never take the first offer. My wife did that (she's also a programmer) and she's getting paid shit salary by a shit company to get shit on all day.

From Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In

"But what's interesting," she says, "was that when my brother-in-law and my husband were saying 'negotiate, negotiate, negotiate' – when I finally said OK I'll do it, because no man would take the first offer, I then thought to myself, I felt like I needed a justification for doing it. And it turns out that's what the data says: men can negotiate without apology or justification. It's expected. If women negotiate, they need to justify it. It can't be that you want more for you. Because that's what men get to do." As she writes in the book, "success and likability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women."

https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2013/mar/15/facebook...

[rootlocus]

On a related note, my company raises salaries yearly as a percentage of the current salary. Even though those with lower salaries get a slightly larger percentage, everyone gets somewhere between 8% to 15%. Having a higher initial offer and asking for a higher raise (and arguing that you earned it) results in better raises. Nobody expects everyone to get the same salary.